Monday, November 23, 2015

The sun stayed shining yesterday, and my bike ride was a success. I prepared my bike carefully before I left, but in the process I forgot about my body, and I neglected to put on any sunscreen. I don’t put on sunscreen all the time. I do it only when I’ve been out of the sun for a while and suddenly go back out into it. So I burned a fair amount on my forearms, neck, and face. It isn’t that bad but it is noticeable. The people that know me on the streets here all reacted strongly when they saw me upon my return. One of my best features from their point of view was my lily-white skin. Seeing it turn dark upset them a bit.

The ride to the ferry dock went by without much incident. I had to return a lot of greetings, and I saw a couple of interesting sights, particularly some views off bridges and a lone English school sitting out in the middle of nowhere. I also had to fight my way through the traffic jam that builds up on the muddy and potholed section of road in front of the big fish warehouses. The ferry dock comes soon after that. Immediately after the ferry dock, I came upon a group of eight or nine government workers resting in the shade and having a drink. It’s unlikely that I got their story straight, but I was told that they were surveying the official boundary between the two neighboring towns of Tanjungbalai and Asahan. There’s no reason they couldn’t be doing this, but I saw no surveying equipment of any kind – not even a pencil and a notebook. Of course, we posed for photos.

I was curious about a few things I saw around me, and I tried to ask the woman in the group about them. However, she had no idea what I was asking. She simply stared at me without a change in her facial expression. I don’t think she realized I was asking a question. My main interest was in the economic lives of the people living in the houses around me. That, not surprisingly, always fascinates me. I wish I had a pushier personality so that I could ask more direct questions and get information. I want to know what people do for a living, how much money they make, and whether their lives are difficult or not. I hesitate to ask these questions because they are very personal. And there is a point where you stray into poverty tourism – visiting the worst slums, etc. just to satisfy your own curiousity and to get a bit of a thrill. A lot of people do that. But I’d noticed that every house, even those that qualify more as a shack than a house, has a TV hooked up to a very large parabolic antennae. These large antennae are a dominating feature of this town. And so I get curious how a person that lives in nothing but chunks of old wood and steel hammered together into a rough square still manages to have such a massive antennae and a TV. Are they so cheap that everyone can afford them? Or is TV so important that people will sacrifice everything to be able to afford one? The same goes for fancy scooters and motorcycles. Tanjungbalai seems like a cash-poor place. So how do you explain the fact that everyone rides around on fifteen-hundred-dollar Honda and Yamaha scooters? My one contact explained that this was possible because people buy them on credit. Perhaps the TVs are purchased the same way.

After the ferry dock, I found myself in a maze of extremely narrow cement and wooden walkways. I wasn’t expecting that at all. It was similar in many ways to the oceanside slums that I saw everywhere in the Philippines – houses built on stilts pounded into the water with raised cement and wooden platforms running between them. The cement pathways are just wide enough for two people to pass each other, and the houses are either right up against the walkway or set back a little bit with a wooden gangplank connecting them. There was no possibility of riding my bike. It was a bit of a challenge just walking with my bike. I’d have preferred to park and lock up the bike, but I didn’t see a safe place to do that. So I pushed my bike along and I soon gathered a large group of children. They competed amongst themselves to see who could walk right beside me and put their hands on my bike’s seat or pannier rack or handlebars. It gave them a certain ownership of me, and they took pleasure in shouting ahead to their friends and then seeing the look of shock and surprise on their faces when they turned and saw me.

It’s always a crazy and even overwhelming experience to walk around inside these very crowded communities. In the past, I’ve likened it to walking through people’s livingrooms. It’s a bit intrusive. Their houses are just a foot or two away on each side, and the doors and windows are wide open and you can see inside and see everything. In any event, life is very much lived outside in these communities and you see people washing themselves, washing clothes, preparing food, eating food, getting dressed and doing the hundred other tasks of daily life. Again, I find myself curious about the realities of living in a place like that. I often talk about their virtues – the sense of community that they have, the excitement that’s in the air, the variety of the social life. You know everyone and everyone knows you and every moment is passed in the company of others. It has none of the isolated qualities of life in Canada where everything goes on behind walls and doors. Yet, it is cramped and crowded. I imagine the noise and lack of privacy must become very annoying. I did not see any outdoor toilets (which I saw everywhere in the Philippines), so I wondered how that important part of life was taken care of here. I also did not see any water sources. And I didn’t get a good look at how people cooked. Basically, I walked through the place and understood nothing of what it was really like. I just got impressions.

One of the strongest impressions I got was, again, how hard women work everywhere in the world. In these communities, it falls to the women to prepare the food, to wash the clothes, and to care for the young. And these are the hardest things to do by far. It’s always the laundry that hits me. I often do laundry by hand, and I hate it above all things. In fact, I buy clothing specifically designed to last a very long time without needing to be washed. It’s also clothing that is very light and thin and made of special material that dries in minutes. All the local clothing is made of standard cotton, and it takes a lot of muscle power and a lot of time to clean it. It also takes a long time to dry. Washing the clothes for an entire family seems a neverending chore when you have a machine to do it. Imagine the chore when you do it all by hand in the ocean. When I got as far as I could go in this community and I reached the end of the cement pathways, I found myself right at the ocean where a large group of women were up to their waist in water and pounding clothes against the cement to wash them. I felt more than a little awkward because this is a Muslim community, and the women were somewhat undressed and soaking wet. The last thing they wanted was a hulking white guy showing up with a weird bicycle and a camera. But no one really seemed to mind. One vociferous woman stood beside me and shouted out to everyone what she thought I was doing and what I was going to do next. She also tried to get the children under control and have the growing mass of them back off a bit. The whole situation was a bit overwhelming, and I quickly turned my bike around, waved goodbye, and set off back into the maze. A friendly guide or two showed me the quickest way out of the maze and back onto the main road.

Once I was on the main road, I cycled quickly along until I came to the town of Asahan. There, I encountered a fork in the road. One side went to a dock and the other went to the center of the town. I knew this because of the wonderful powers of my smartphone. I could just take it out and see the bright dot that indicated where I was (thanks to satellites) and all the roads around me. While I was looking at my smartphone, I noticed a tiny kitten starving to death on a bench. This has been a common sight here. There is a large cat population in Tanjungbalai, and all the female cats are pregnant all the time and producing litter after litter after litter. There’s no way to know the exact numbers, but I imagine the vast majority of these kittens die. There’s no other way to look at it. If they didn’t, this place would be drowning in millions of cats in no time. Eveywhere I go, I encounter dying kitttens, either by themselves or curled up in groups. Some are mewing loudly. Most are completely silent and nearly oblivious to life. They are nothing but skin and bones and all that remains for them to do is stop breathing. There is nothing you can do for them unless you wish to start up a cat shelter charity and spend the rest of your life here.

I chose the left side of the fork and rode to the dock. I was pleasantly surprised to find it quite an active place. There were the usual large fishing boats unloading their catch. I often wonder what these places were like a few decades ago. I have to believe that they used to catch very large fish in equally large numbers. Now, the biggest fish I ever see are eight or nine inches long. And they are in such small numbers, it hardly seems worth the effort and cost to catch them. Yet, fishing is still a very large part of the local economy, and the fishing fleet is massive, so they must still manage to make a living. Having grown up in Sarnia with zero exposure to fresh seafood of any kind, it is always strange to be surrounded by so many fish. For people here, rice and fish are the sustainers of life. They get excited about fish and eating them whereas I only see stinky, unpleasant things. I associate fish with smelly things that died and are lying on the sand around Lake Huron. I see a fish and I don’t think, “Yum! I want to eat that.” I just think I want to stop breathing through my nose and get as far away as possible.

A group of young boys had each gotten a handful of fish from a large fishing boat, and they eagerly showed them to me. I took a couple of pictures, and then had to shake my head no many times as they tried to sell them to me. Grown men also tried to sell me fish. They all had to leave disappointed. People constantly ask me my opinion of Indonesia in general and Sumatra in particular. They want to know what I like and don’t like. They generally expect me to rave about how wonderful the seafood is, since Sumatra is known for its good seafood. I have to disappoint them each time and explain that I just don’t like seafood at all. To me, the creatures of the ocean look and smell inedible.

Another interesting encounter was with a group of singers and dancers. I passed them when I first arrived, and they were performing for a movie camera on the dock. There was a single older man and a group of four women performing. Then there was a film crew of three or four people. I saw them later on sitting in the shade and taking a break. I stopped to talk with them, and to my amusement, the camerawoman whipped out a Nikon D90 and started taking pictures of me. I was jealous that she had a D90, and I wanted to talk about cameras with her, but she didn’t speak enough English for that. The man was the best English speaker, and I communicated with him while we posed for a series of pictures. I’m very glad I resisted my impulse to leave behind my Canon point-and-shoot camera in Malaysia. It is very useful for taking these “selfies”. Neither my smartphone nor my Olympus is suitable for handing over to someone else to take a picture. The Canon serves this purpose admirably.

I left the dock and returned to the fork and then went into the central part of Asahan. I soon found myself lost inside another maze of cement walkways crowded with wooden houses. As with the other community I had explored earlier, I wondered about mosquitoes. There was murky and muddy and garbage-filled water everywhere underneath and around these houses, and it looked like a perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes and other nasty creatures. The conditions didn’t look healthy at all. Yet, I didn’t see any mosquitoes or mosquito nets. I wondered if they were a problem at night. My guess is that the mosquitoes came out in their millions. I couldn’t survive a single night without a mosquito net.

Despite the rough conditions, this community was quite settled. The houses were solidly made of wood. They were wired for electricity. Everyone seemed to have a TV and a stereo system. There were many small shops and even a couple of quite large Internet cafes. Not surprisingly, the Internet cafes were crowded with young boys and girls playing video games and watching videos. I had no idea where I was going, and I went deeper and deeper into this maze (again walking my bicycle) until I suddenly popped out the other side and found myself back at the docks. I could feel the sun burning into my skin, and I knew it was time to go home and get out of the sun. I rode back at a fast pace and quickly jumped into the bucket bath area of my hotel to pour some cooling water over my skin. The damage, I was pleased to see, was not that bad. My skin was reddened and burned but not terribly so. I think I avoided getting a very bad burn. Hopefully, the burn will turn into a tan and I will start building up my resistance to the sun again.

I passed the rest of the afternoon and evening sorting through the pictures I took and going out to find food for dinner. The sun had taken it out of me, and I went to bed early.

 

Tags: Sumatra Part 01